Indicator: Goods, services and capital Concentration Index

The concentration-per-population index is the Gini index. High values of the indicator show a high spa-tial concentration of flows, and low values show a low spatial concentration of flows in a given region.
In the goods/services/capital basket, the highest differentiation of spatial concentration concerns the flow of goods trade, where Scandinavian countries, but also Switzerland and Greece, are characterized by a very high concentration of flows. On the other hand, Ile-de-France and other single regions in Eu-rope are characterized by a very large spatial dispersion of flows. The remaining flows within the goods/services/capital basket appear to have a more balanced distribution of the concentration of flows, although a strong spatial concentration of flows was also observed for FDI capital in Greece and Ice-land. In general, a higher concentration emerges in the peripheral areas of the ESPON space. Charac-teristically, this applies to both wealthier (Scandinavia) and poorer (Central and Eastern Europe) regions. The core-periphery system is most visible in the case of trade.
The synthetic matrix of the goods/services/capital basket shows the culmination of spatial concentra-tion for the Scandinavian countries and Greece. On the other hand, the most spatially diversified flows within the goods/services/capital basket are a feature of regions in a fairly compact spatial cluster, from Catalonia to the European core, i.e. northern Italy and eastern France to Belgium and the Netherlands, but with the exception of highly spatially concentrated flows in Switzerland and the northern Nether-lands. The core-periphery system is visible, but it is also overlaid by national structures. In many coun-tries the concentration is noticeably lower in capitals and other large metropolitan areas. This means that metropolitan regions there have a much more geographically diverse structure in terms of economic partners. They are thus less sensitive to external economic shocks. They are also probably the interna-tional economic "gateways" of their countries. Examples are Barcelona and Madrid in Spain, Athens and Thessaloniki in Greece, Warsaw in Poland, Bucharest in Romania, and even Paris in France. The box-plot analysis for the goods/services/capital basket confirms a relatively higher spatial concentration in non-EU ESPON countries (e.g. Norway and Switzerland), in less-developed regions, and in areas with a low total FUA populations. This confirms the previous thesis that poorly urbanised peripheral regions are oriented towards relations with a limited number of regions. This may result from both economic (sec-toral) specialisation and the need to use "intermediaries" in international relations.